No Day Without a Line (and at least one day without a screen)

While I was casting around for something to write about today, my eyes landed on a book that I've been using, completely fortuitously, to prop up my monitor: No Day Without a Line by Yuri Olesha.

As some of my former students know, Olesha is really my favorite author of all time. I may have raved on this blog about others who are far better known, like Dostoevsky and Melville, but Olesha really is the guy.* This Soviet-era author, born in 1899, was "young with the century," as he put it. He is best known for his 1927 novella Envy, a magical-realist encomium to, and take-down of, early Soviet-style materialist culture. You see the influence of H. G. Wells and Dostoevsky in the story, but at the same time, there's really nothing else quite like it. It's a Freudian/political fairy tale that employs some of the most vivid and memorable images I have ever come across.

Here's just one passage (from the NYRB edition, translated by Marian Schwartz):

I entertain myself with observations. Have you ever noticed that salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a trace--the knife shines as if untouched; that pince-nez traverse the bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils?

No Day Without a Line is a fragmentary memoir written, according to translator Judson Rosengrant, primarily during the six years before Olesha's death in 1960. In it, we see Olesha entertaining himself with observations--a pleasure which is also a serious discipline. Many of these observations are not direct, but in the form of childhood memories which Olesha observes meticulously. In fact it's childhood in the form of memory that makes these images so striking. They are not dry recollections of "what things were like back then," but brief, poetic addresses to sights Olesha saw and loved and knows he will never see again in this same way:

In Odessa we sailed on the sea in punts. These were large, heavy boats with a flat bottom and no keel--something on the order of a cart thrown into the sea without its wheels. They were crudely painted in red and blue and moved by means of huge, heavy oars secured to the oarlocks with a strength sufficient at least for tethering oxen. In the bottom of these boats there was always water--puddles in which rags, pieces of shrimp, or a bottle swam. The punt skimmed over the waves. There was something of the Greek myths about the appearance of these boats. Even now I remember, as if I'd only seen it yesterday, the brown pear-like calves of the fishermen as they ran behind a boat they were launching, in order to leap into it once it was afloat.

Those "pear-like calves" are pure Olesha: that unexpected comparison, often between food and a body part, which makes the comparison both memorable and slightly forbidden. There's a visceral, yet innocent attraction to the fishermen's calves that an "adult" mind would probably chase away--especially one in Olesha's place and time. (Envy is often read as a story of unrequited gay love.) But if we can learn not to banish such images, we can light up our own fiction with startling beauty. It sounds like a cliche, but this passage really makes me feel like I'm right there in Odessa in the early 20th century. That's an amazing feat of teleportation, and it works because we're traveling through a particular consciousness, rather than generic reportage.

All of this makes me worry more than ever that I--and possibly many of my fellow writers--are spending way, way too much time in front of screens. We are no longer entertaining ourselves with unmediated observations. We are not going down to the sea and watching fishermen get into boats; or if we do, we are too distracted, or cynical, or something, to just take it in. Maybe we are not taking the time to really remember--and color with memory--what we saw in childhood. There are too many layers between writing and experience. I certainly sense this in my own work; the screen is always there somehow, humming, inserting itself ever so subtly. Writing today may be more "knowing," but a lot of it doesn't seem nearly as fresh as Olesha's much older work.

Fortunately that problem is fixable, entirely free of charge. If I can just tear myself away from this computer.

*I did have the opportunity, some years ago, to rave about Olesha in Tin House. That obviously didn't get the raving out of my system.



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The Turn of the Screw: The storytelling setting, then and now

At long last, roused from a torpor of varied and largely uninteresting origins, I am ready to begin dissecting Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." For readers new to the Borrowed Fire series on this blog, my goal here is to read works of classic literature, not primarily for their themes or meanings, but to learn the craft of fiction writing. There are techniques these old guys use that I suspect contemporary writers, including me, haven't thought so much about--or never really thought of as techniques. So I'm hoping to awaken and inspire new (old) ways of writing in us all.

Here we go with James.

The Turn of the Screw is a framed story (actually a novella), meaning that a storyteller and his listener(s) are introduced to us before the story itself actually begins. We've seen this before, with Wells's "The Door in the Wall," which is also a fantastic tale. The frame offers the writer a couple of opportunities. In "Door," Wells plays up how the narrator (to whom the original tale was recounted by a friend, which is also the case in "Turn,") struggled with whether or not to believe the story, because it is so fantastic. He also mentions, tantalizingly, that the friend has since died under mysterious circumstances--which we must assume are connected to the story. The story killed him! We have to read it now! So, Wells has built up our desire to read on, while also calling into question whether the story is true.

For Turn, James creates a more elaborate set-up. It's Christmas Eve, and friends are gathered around a fire, telling each other scary stories. Two tales have been told already by the time we get to the party, and we get the gist--only the gist--of one of them:

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.

"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?"

"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

Rather than just plunking him down in front of us (as Wells does), James has his storyteller emerge a bit more slowly, from the shadows. This is one way in which James's storytelling scene is more psychologically complex that Wells's from the get-go. The narrator and his friends, first of all, are sophisticates--too clever for sentimentality on Christmas Eve, they insist on "gruesome" tales for the occasion. They're also aware that they are such clever people, and are pretty pleased with themselves for liking awful stories about children. In addition, they're critics; they like some tales better than others.

Douglas, the storyteller-to-be, takes this self-awareness to another level (or gives it another turn):

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it."

"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful—dreadfulness!"

"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."

"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."

Douglas is playing to his audience "with quiet art." He knows that they know he is playing them; they expect it, and play their own parts knowingly. At the same time, though, we get the sense from Douglas's gestures and facial expressions that he really is disturbed by the story. It has the power to overwhelm his playful sophistication. Our anticipation rises, as does our sense of Douglas (and the narrator, to a lesser extent) as complex human beings with stories of their own.

We soon learn that the story actually exists as a manuscript, written down by Douglas's sister's governess, with whom--his listeners glean--Douglas had been in love. But Douglas needs to send for the manuscript by post before he can tell the story (which he will read aloud to the group), and after announcing this disappointing news, he goes to bed. So there is literally a postponement, and the listeners use the occasion to ramp up their anticipation even more:

From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in love with, I know who HE was."

"She was ten years older," said her husband.

"Raison de plus—at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."

"Forty years!" Griffin put in.

"With this outbreak at last."

"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and "candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.

But then James turns the screw again: the narrator tells us that these events--the telling of the tale--happened long ago, that Douglas is now dead, and that he gave the manuscript to the narrator before dying. We then return to the storytelling scene, which is in fact two days later (and which we now know is in the distant past), and Douglas begins to read the manuscript aloud. The narrator says, he "read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author's hand." In other words, he's become a ventriloquist for the governess, and that is how we are to hear (and read) the rest of the story. Which is kind of odd.

Like Wells, James creates a frame that both sets the story in relief, and blurs it. In both stories, we are warned not to fully trust the tale or the teller, because origins and motivations are obscure. James gives us a more complex setting for the tale to be told in than Wells does; the setting itself implies relationships and motivations that we may or may not fully understand later. But we do anticipate that Douglas's story will have bearing on the setting in which it's told. It will not only affect the listeners and the teller outright in some way, but it will comment upon the whole social situation into which it is emerging. The frame is no mere device in James; it's something we are meant to pay attention to and integrate into our experience of the story.

So: suppose we writers want to create a framed narrative like this one. How would we go about it? First off, how would we create a credible contemporary scene of people sitting around trying to scare each other with ghost stories? Does it even happen at summer camp anymore? Or would it only occur in the event of some drastic failure of technology, like the power going out so other forms of entertainment weren't available? Where and when, in our time, would such a storytelling situation arise? Then: what would the story itself be, and how would it reflect back, in complex, interesting ways, on the setting in which it's told?

Gilead

So I finally read Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-winning novel, Gilead.

Let me start off by saying, because it's all about me, always, that this book made me feel, as a writer, like a total juvenile smartass poseur. As the critics have all said, this is a serious book. I thought I had gotten over that "why bother" feeling when reading published novels, even the Great Ones--it's all just material for stealing. But now I feel inadequate not only as a writer but as a person.

Still, a deep sense of inadequacy is, as we've all seen, a powerful motive to keep on talking. And so I will offer the following observations about the novel. Observations which I've made. Which are mine. And which will follow. The next thing I say will be my observations about Gilead.

Told in the voice of John Ames, a Congregational minister in Iowa in the early 1960s, the book contains many images of sparkling light and especially water. In a post on H. G. Wells, I suggested that this type of imagery is strongly suggestive of childhood. There's a kind of "light of childhood," I said, that shows the ordinary world anew--making it strange, wonderful, and (perhaps paradoxically) nostalgic. Though Ames sometimes uses such imagery in connection with children or childhood, for him they are more explicitly an aspect of divine grace. Water in particular, he explains, is used in blessings because of its clarity and beauty. In this book, the light of childhood is the light of the sacred.

Of course nostalgia for childhood is in there too, especially because Ames is dying, and also because he's writing this narrative as a letter to his young son, whom he will not see grow up. He's nostalgic for his son's childhood, much of which he will miss, as well as for his own. However, because he believes in God and in an afterlife, the beauty of light and water is also a promise that this world is not the end. It is, perhaps, a mere reflection of the heaven that awaits...well, in Ames's view, probably most all of us. He's deeply committed to his particular faith, and wants others to embrace it--but when they don't, he does not exclude them from his life, nor does he assume that God excludes them. He tries to understand what it is, within himself, that makes him want to turn away from them. And then he tries to turn back toward them--not with a veneer of false politeness, but with genuine openness. This plays out in the growing conflict between Ames and his best friend's son, named after Ames, who, by any reasonable standard, is a scoundrel. Imagine doing that--truly, honestly doing that--with someone that you really have every right to despise. It's damn hard, and it's hard for Ames, but he makes himself do it. His reading of the Bible is a humble one; the only way for him to behave is humbly.

That's the other extraordinary thing about this book: it is the self-accounting of a profoundly good man, but it is neither hectoring nor boring. It's actually inspiring and exemplary. Mind you I'm not going to run off and join the Congregationalists or any church. Ain't gonna happen. But this book provides tremendous hope in terms of what Christianity can be--and how degenerate it has become in the loudest segments of our current culture. For those of us who can't buy the whole God construct, it's helpful to think of Ames's religion as a language, which is not to trivialize it in any way. Rather, he has a beautiful language to express the world to us, a beautiful lens through which to see it.

Now back to writing my smartass poseur novel.

Borrowed Fire: The Secret Agent: What the bell brings out

Let's now borrow some writing techniques from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. This novel, from 1907, has been adapted for film a few times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in Sabotage. I went to a talk about this film recently, so maybe that's why it's on my mind. The story bubbles up from my subconscious now and then anyway, and I dread rereading it. I think it's one of the most disturbing books in the western canon. It's based on a real-life terrorist bombing, and of course it's been referenced quite a bit since September 11. But even discounting its prescience for our own times, the story is soaked with evil. It oozes. Sometimes the evil is so thick it is hard for the reader to move through; it's like walking through a swamp.

How does Conrad do it?

In the opening paragraphs, Conrad uses one particular object to stir up the physical and moral grime of the setting, so we get a good look at how truly gross it all is. That object is a bell:

Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.

The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.

These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.

The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence.

It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the painted deal counter, Mr Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller’s engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr Verloc knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of æsthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm, steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.

Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s shop one-and-sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.

The bell acts like a stick poking around in a mud puddle. Without it, we'd just see undifferentiated slime--seedy customers, seedy offerings, grime and decay. But when the bell rings, it has to be answered, and that allows Conrad to bring forth Verloc. In fact, the bell is like an incantation. It collects dollops of goo and gunk from the shop and breathes life (or some semblance thereof) into them: voila, Verloc. I love the word "issue" here to describe Verloc's entrance, like a blast of foul air. Then the bell rings again, and out comes Winnie, who forms a counterpoint to Verloc and the general filth. But her tidiness (and gender) stir up other distasteful elements--shame and rage--which then become part of the swirling awfulness.

This bell is a brilliant way to introduce characters. The way they arise from the muck, answering the bell as they must, makes them almost like automata. That, too, adds to the menace. You sense an inevitable horror coming, right from the start.

So a technique we can try is: set the scene, then use a catalyst--some kind of object, the smaller and more specific, the better--to get the scene and the story moving. And maybe the object should function somewhat unexpectedly. You might think of a ringing bell on a shop door as a cheery sound. Not here, boy.

UPDATE: Interesting: The Secret Agent is dedicated to H. G. Wells.

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: Did he see it like that?

One more exercise from "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

It's a convention in non-realistic storytelling (fantasy, science fiction, and literary versions thereof) to end the tale with the question: Did this really happen? We've seen this, for instance, in "The Overcoat," and I've previously touched on it in "The Door in the Wall." If I were going to wander down the po-mo garden path, I might blather on about the "narrative frame" and the "frame" that is the door itself--which means this story is about fiction itself, as all stories are. But where does that really get us? Down the rabbit hole, to either death or paradise.

Anyhow:

The trick of these endings is to create a knife's edge balance between "yes" and "no" that can never be resolved, but instead spins out more questions. What is reality? What is fiction? What role does fiction play in creating reality? And if fiction plays too great a role, does that equal madness, or a different form of sanity? Wells states the matter starkly:

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?

Yes, it's a trick ending, but I think it's a lovely one. The narrator cannot get the storyteller, Wallace, out of his head. He knows he will never understand what happened, but he chooses, perhaps for his own consolation, to think that Wallace did reach his paradise.

"Did he see it like that?" is a pressing question for our own time. Even mild depression, shyness, fatigue, and restlessness are now called "syndromes" and instantly medicated, perhaps erasing the reality checks we all need. I'm reminded of Margaret Talbot's recent New Yorker article on neuroenhancing drugs. Students and workers are now using Ritalin, Adderall, and other drugs as cognitive performance enhancers rather than just treatments for illnesses. But, as one psychiatrist puts it: "Maybe it’s wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people." In other words, maybe the problem is not the peg, but the hole we're trying to hammer it into. There's also the fascinating article on Wired.com on schizophrenic brains, which aren't fooled by the optical illusions that the rest of us can't help seeing. Now, I have no desire to be schizophrenic; but it's deeply unsettling to think that "crazy" people see the world as it really is. What's really out there might be impossible to handle. These thoughts also bear on religious faith, of course. What did Wallace see, when to the outside world it appeared he fell to his death?

This is all starting to sound a bit like 3 a.m. in the dorm, bong optional. Well, what of it? Has anyone successfully dealt with these questions? If not, they remain the territory and the imperative of fiction.

So: if you're looking for a story idea, try writing about a character who sees something others don't see. I would suggest having him or her see something very specific and concrete, like the door in the wall. (Not: "I see dead people.") That person should seem otherwise quite rational, but he or she could end up unsettling the world.

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: Light

We continue with "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

Wallace recollects his childhood experience of passing through a green door in a white wall, which he spots on an otherwise ordinary London street:

You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen's carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline and obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy--in another world. It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them, and it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said 'Well?' to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know, between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves . . . . .

The description goes on at some length. The boy meets up with another, older female figure who seems to show Wallace the story of his real life--a life which will henceforth be tinged with sharp sadness over his loss of this place.

But let's focus on the quality of the light in the other world: "It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky." Both Nabokov and Olesha, whom I mentioned in the last post on this story, are fascinated by light. They use it to create what the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky calls "ostranenie," sometimes translated as "defamiliarization." In the garden, the light is at once more penetrating and softer; the edges of things are sharper and yet somehow fuzzy. Colors are brighter and but set off by "wisps." In sort, the light makes this world both more intense and less threatening than the real world. It is, as Wells, Nabokov, and Olesha would all agree, the light of childhood. Cast this light upon anything in the real world, and you will see it anew. At the same time, the fact that this light is remembered, not currently present, makes the image slightly sad.

Much of Wells's description of the garden comes across as sentimental and twee. Such language has to be resisted at all costs when speaking of childhood, or of anything, actually. I would, however, propose a writing exercise in which you experiment with enchanted lighting to make a scene strange. The strangeness comes from the intensely contradictory emotions of childhood memory--joy at finding it, sadness at having lost it forever.

For more on enchantment, see The Re-Enchantment of the World, edited by Josh Landy and Michael Saler.

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: The Conversation

Our next story is "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

I first came across this story while doing research on Nabokov's Lolita, which I taught in my class, Does Literature Matter?, at Stanford. In his article "H. G. Wells's 'The Door in the Wall'" in Russian Literature,"* Richard Borden shows that this particular tale strongly influenced both Nabokov and another favorite of mine, Yuri Olesha. Nabokov vividly alludes to this story in the enchanting, green-suffused scene in which Humbert Humbert first sees Lolita sunning herself in the backyard.

We'll get back to greenness and enchantment. For this post, I want to talk about the frame for this story. It always amazes me how many science fiction and fantasy stories are portrayed as conversations, or remembered conversations ("The Turn of the Screw" comes to mind, as do many of Poe's stories, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Poul Anderson's stories, and many others). The story is either told directly to the narrator by an acquaintance, or the narrator is recalling how the acquaintance (or friend) told him the story. The narrator himself disappears for most of the tale, but steps in every now and then to comment on the storyteller's emotional state (often distraught or seemingly deranged)--and to wonder whether the story could possibly be true. I've never been quite sure what this convention does for us as readers, but because it's so prevalent, it must have some special power.

So here's the opening of "The Door in the Wall":

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well."

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.

The narrator's musings about truth vs. fiction, and the overall distancing effect of his presence, aren't particularly earth-shaking as devices; in fact I'd venture to guess that even by Wells's time these were cliches. We don't see this set-up too often in contemporary literary fiction, perhaps for that reason. And yet, the narrator's ability to comment on the storyteller, as well as the story, seems like a great opportunity. I also like the notion of creating a setting for the telling of the story, which contrasts with the actual story's setting. The former is usually some tranquil or festive domestic scene; a little dinner, a little wine, a little party. Those hearing the tale are often a bit bored with their staid, comfortable lives, and relish being shaken up--although they generally end up more shaken than they wish to be, and sometimes make themselves part of the story later on by going out to investigate.

So for an exercise, we can try framing a story in this manner. You might even play up, or play with, this gentlemen-after-dinner cliche, as a starting point for characterizing both the narrator and the storyteller. What's the relationship between these two (or more) people? How does our ability to see and hear the actual storyteller affect the story itself? And what kind of story does this sort of frame seem to generate? Would the teller tell it differently on some other, so to speak, narrative occasion?

* The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 323-338.